Only 17?: Plenty of Senators Are Just as Far to the Left as Vermont's Proud Socialist - or Farther

About the Author

He was referring to the "usually soft-spoken" senior Republican
on the House Financial Services Committee, who had told a
Birmingham reporter that there are 17 "socialists" in Congress.

Bachus's assertion prompted what Thrush characterized as "cries
of McCarthyism in the lefty blogosphere" -- especially when he
named only one lawmaker: Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who
happily calls himself a "democratic socialist."

"Has Spencer released his list yet?" Sanders joked. "Everybody's
waiting with bated breath. . . .I think at the very least he has to
tell people what his definition of socialism is."

At the risk of inviting the Left's wrath, let me help flesh out
a list. As for that elusive definition of "socialism," I'll use as
a barometer the voting record compiled by the Senate's only avowed
man of the people -- the distinguished gentleman from Vermont
himself. That is, we can presume the more often a lawmaker votes
with Congress's lone acknowledged socialist, the greater his or her
comfort level with the sort of policies he embraces.

Thus far in 2009, senators have cast 154 roll-call votes, many
of which have been of historic importance. It's not every Congress,
after all, that jumps out of the starting gate and passes
trillion-dollar stimulus packages, creates new entitlement programs
and expands old ones, repeals the most successful social-policy
accomplishment in over half a century (welfare reform), doubles
Uncle Sam's role in education, lays the groundwork for the
government's takeover of our health system, and sets in motion a
multi-hundred-billion-dollar tax increase on that most despised of
constituent groups -- the "rich."

Yes, these first few months of the Obama Era have been heady
times indeed for those who see a government solution to every
societal problem.

Only one senator has voted entirely in sync with Sanders: Sen.
Ted Kennedy of Massachusetts. But due to his severe illness, he has
voted only eight times, so we will not count him in the following
tabulations.

The sameness of voting records holds up when you exclude about
50 votes -- cloture motions, votes to confirm nominees to various
executive-branch positions, and so on -- that shed little light on
one's philosophical disposition.

Of course, not every Democratic senator votes in lockstep with
Sanders. The greatest deviationist among Senate Democrats is
Nebraska's Ben Nelson, who still managed to agree with the
Vermonter 59 percent of the time.

Republican senators who toe the Sanders line most often are (can
you guess?) Maine's Olympia Snowe (61 percent) and Susan Collins
(56), followed by Pennsylvania's Arlen Specter (53).

To the conservative untutored in the nuances of modern-day
socialism, some of Sanders's votes may be surprising. For example,
he joins most Republicans in his avid support of Second Amendment
rights (a well-armed citizenry is the only defense against fascist
storm troopers who might one day invade our homes and strip us of
our rights). And he was one of only eight Democrats to vote against
releasing the second $350 billion installment of funds for the
Troubled Asset Relief Program (the proletariat should not pay for
the sins of capitalist bankers). These votes explain why even Jim
Inhofe and Jim DeMint agree with Sanders about 10 to 15 percent of
the time, and they suggest that some of his liberal colleagues, who
routinely vote against Second Amendment rights and for corporate
bailouts, may actually be to the left of thesocialist Sanders!

This raises the question: Why does Sanders fit so comfortably
into the modern Democratic party? Is he a fraud, just another
run-of-the-mill liberal Democrat who sports the socialist label to
impress granola-crunching, tree-hugging, redistributionist liberals
in Vermont? This is entirely possible. After all, during the eight
terms Sanders served in the House before moving to the Senate, he
amassed an impressive, but by no means remarkable, liberal voting
record.

In fact, Representative Bachus may be surprised to learn that,
according to the American conservative Union's congressional voting
scorecard, Sanders toed the conservative line more often -- at 6.5
percent of the time (must be those Second Amendment votes) -- than
did more than 100 of his former House colleagues, including Speaker
Nancy Pelosi (2.8 percent) and Reps. Henry Waxman (4.7), George
Miller (4.5), Barney Frank (4.4), Rosa DeLauro (4.3), Maxine Waters
(3.3), Jesse Jackson Jr> (3.1), and Charlie Rangel (3.7).

An alternative explanation may be that all the recent
hyper-partisanship on Capitol Hill and the ideological realignment
of our two major parties have left us with a national
left-of-center party that boasts a sizable contingent of elected
officials whose worldviews are -- for all practical purposes --
indistinguishable from those of their leftist counterparts in
Europe's socialist parties.

What one calls these lawmakers -- liberals, progressives,
statists, or even (gasp) socialists -- is less important than our
acknowledgment that the center of gravity for today's liberal is
much farther to the left than it has been at any time in our recent
history.

Mike Franc is Vice
President for Government Relations at The Heritage
Foundation.